The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by James Lawrence

Author:James, Lawrence [James, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1997-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Most of the casualties had been suffered in France where, in November 1918, there were just under two million British soldiers under arms, alongside 154,000 Canadians, 94,000 Australians and 25,000 New Zealanders. A further 306,000 imperial troops including 92,000 Indians and 20,000 Australians were deployed in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. There were 222,000 soldiers serving in Mesopotamia of whom 120,000 were Indian and 102,000 British. There were over a third of a million native labourers working on lines of communication throughout the Middle East.31

For the dominions, the experience of war had been a rite of passage to nationhood. Anzac Day, the anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli, became a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand. Its emotional meaning and the part played by those who had died in the development of national consciousness were poignantly illustrated in a small ceremony re-enacted at school morning assemblies in New Zealand during the 1920s. A boy faced a portrait of George V, saluted and then announced: ‘Our King inspires loyalty and devotion to our country and its laws because he rules by consent of the people. God Save the King!’ The National Anthem was sung. Afterwards, a boy recited these lines:

The Great War proved that thousands of New Zealanders thought our beautiful country worth dying for. Like them, we pledge ourselves to live and, if necessary, die for our country and for our comrades throughout the Empire …32

But had men died for the empire? Recruiting slogans and posters made much of the empire; a patriotic ABC for Canadian soldiers written in 1916 included the exhortation, ‘E is the Empire for which we would die’, and there were plenty of illustrations which showed the British lion roaring defiance with her cubs (the dominions) adding their yelps.33 Keith Fallis, a missionary’s son who at nineteen had enlisted in the Canadian army, believed that he, and presumably others, had been ‘brainwashed’ by prewar imperial propaganda. ‘I never questioned’, he later recollected, ‘that what we were doing was right and that the Germans were all wrong and that we were fighting to make the world safe for democracy.’34 The front was no place for flag-waving since soldiers’ minds were wholly concentrated on staying alive or recuperating from the trauma of battle. Working-class British soldiers in France were unmoved by the word ‘empire’, although some were stirred by it in the mistaken belief that it referred to the Empire Music Hall!35 During a war cabinet discussion of future imperial organisation in July 1918, the forthright Australian Labour Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, remarked that three-quarters of his countrymen then in France wanted nothing more to do with the empire.36

The black soldier’s motive for fighting is not always easy to discern, for he seldom left any record of his experiences. When explanations of the war were offered them, they focussed on the possibility that the Germans would come and take their land. This was what recruits in Nyasaland heard in 1914.37 A Nigerian who served as a

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